Week 1 - Activity 4: Facilitation strategies

In this activity, you and your colleagues will work collaboratively in a Google document to create a curated list of top 10 key facilitation strategies for facilitating learning online. Please read the list of instructions below carefully before beginning.

Instructions:

• Based on your interpretation of the readings, combined with your own experiences as an online learner and/or instructor, what are some key strategies for effective online facilitation? For example, what specific tasks or behaviours would an instructor do or demonstrate in order to be effective as an online facilitator?
• The deliverable for this activity is a concise list of 10 key strategies for effective online facilitation. Work collaboratively to select the top 10 facilitation strategies and develop a concise list of these strategies. (Each item should be stated in less than 50 words).
• Self-organize to include everyone’s input in the activity, get consensus on the top 10 key strategies, and identify a volunteer to share your final list.
• The deadline to complete your work in the Google doc is midnight on Friday of week 1. Please let your course facilitators know when you have completed your task by posting the top ten list in the Open forum by Saturday (3pm PST).
  

Tips:

• As you will all be working collaboratively in a single Google doc, this is an activity that will require collaboration and cooperation amongst yourselves. At times, it may feel messy and confusing, but we have full confidence in your ability to self-organize and complete this task!
• We suggest starting on this activity no later than Wednesday of week 1 as it will require each participant to visit and revisit the collaborative document several times.
• You will notice that we have not provided you with a forum for a discussion. This is intentional! We would like you to come away from this experience with the understanding that not all discussion and collaboration in online learning needs to happen in discussion forums. Your FLO course facilitators will be present and available to support you as needed.

We will revisit the 10 key strategies list every peer-facilitated week to observe these strategies (and other you may encounter) in action.  

Ready to begin? You can access the Google doc: Week 1 Activity 4 Facilitation Strategies  [UPDATE LINK]. We recommend that you use Google Chrome as there have been issues of lag reported when using other browsers to access Google docs.

[Note for FLO facilitators: We recommend you include an audio option for the text above here if using a platform that does not have an audio feature built in. Remove this note before offering starts.]